An ambassador for Princeton

Editor's note:

The print version and initial online version of this article were affected by the inadvertent deletion of the paragraph that introduces Professor Moravcsik's statements about Shanghai during the Chinese New Year, resulting in the lack of appropriate context for those statements. The Daily Princetonian regrets the error.

As Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 sipped green tea and rhapsodized about her “fabulous” and “mind-boggling” Shanghai sabbatical during an interview this week, she shared how her “life-changing experience” influenced her as a scholar and mother and also how her trip impacted her views of the Wilson School and Princeton’s internationalization efforts.

Slaughter and her husband, politics professor Andrew Moravcsik, spent 10 months during the 2007-08 academic year as visiting research fellows at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies (SIIS) while their two sons attended school at the Yew Chung International School of Shanghai. Slaughter had finished her first five-year term as dean before the trip and is beginning her second term this fall.

In addition to serving as a fellow at SIIS, Slaughter acted as an ambassador for Princeton to universities across Asia and spent two months visiting academic institutes in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and across China.

Instead of looking to establish formal ties with particular universities, Slaughter learned about institutional and faculty research projects and interests at the places she visited.

Slaughter, who co-chairs Princeton’s Committee on Internationalization with history department chair Jeremy Adelman, explained that the University hopes to build relationships “from the bottom up” between Princeton’s own faculty and those at other institutes.

“I spent a lot of time telling people, ‘I don’t want to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with your university, but what I do want to do is get a sense of what you do,’ ” she explained.

Slaughter found that many of the universities in China and Asia as a whole “would all like to be connected to Princeton in various ways.”

During many such encounters, however, the main reaction would simply be, “Ah, Einstein’s university,” she explained, adding that she would smile and nod rather than attempt to explain the intricacies of Princeton’s relationship with the Institute for Advanced Study.

Life in Shanghai

Slaughter and Moravcsik had long assumed that, as international relations scholars, they would spend a year abroad, Slaughter said. The pair’s decision to go to China, a country that neither planned to study as scholars and whose language neither spoke, was sparked by Slaughter’s first visit to China in 2004.

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Slaughter and Moravcsik lectured at SIIS, an independent think tank run by the Chinese Foreign Minister’s brother, while the couple worked out of their apartment in the heart of Shanghai.

Though the pair read most of the 25 boxes of books that they sent to Shanghai, they also made time to immerse themselves in local culture.

While Moravcsik studied whether institutions of regional integration like the European Union can work in Asia, Slaughter did not focus on major scholarly work. She thus considers her experience “a true sabbatical.”

Slaughter was impressed by China’s growth, but her experience made her realize that America is still “the country that has the capacity to network with everyone in the world, because we are the country that reflects the world.”

Moravcsik recalled in an e-mail that his most salient experience came during the Chinese New Year. For 10 days, many of Shanghai’s 20 million people lighted "the sort of explosives a small American town might launch on the 4th of July!" he said.

“It’s every kid’s dream come true. Mine as well!” Moravcsik said, adding that “the noise is deafening, the city becomes one giant battle zone, with splashes of color everywhere.”

A ‘quiet year’ at Woody Woo

While thousands of miles away, Slaughter maintained frequent contact with America and with Princeton, e-mailing back and forth with Acting Wilson School Dean Nolan McCarty almost daily. She also kept in touch with faculty and students and blogged for The New York Times.

McCarty, who maintained his position as associate dean of the Wilson School during his year as acting dean, explained that Slaughter’s time away was an opportunity for “catching up on some reforms and ... a quiet year of implementing things that were already in the works.”

These changes included the inaugural year of the Masters in Public Policy program and the introduction of new core requirements for undergraduate concentrators and certificate students.

Professor Stanley Katz, the director of the Wilson School’s undergraduate program, said that the School operated “very effectively” last year, adding that “we were all very lucky that [McCarty] was so adept.”

McCarty, meanwhile, noted that Slaughter “was deeply involved in almost all the decisions that were made over the course of the year,” explaining that, “on any of the big issues, she was still the dean.”

Katz said that Slaughter’s year off was, in a way, beneficial for the Wilson School. Because Slaughter “moves very fast and proposes a lot of new things,” Katz explained, “it’s also good to have a year to take a deep breath and institutionalize some of the things that had been begun the year before.”

After her sabbatical, Slaughter said, she believes she will “be a far better dean.”

“I’m refreshed; I’ve got ideas,” she said.

McCarty, meanwhile, is taking his own sabbatical this year. While he joked that he is “never not ready for a sabbatical,” McCarty said that the additional responsibilities he handled last year “makes the sabbatical [timing] very nice.”